Vue and Bryce benchmarks

As I now have three PCs at home, I made tests to compare their render speeds in both Vue and Bryce.

Benchmark setups

Both tests were made with a very similar scene, using the same 2048 pixels terrain made in Geocontrol 2. The renders themselves were, however, very different. Both scenes were rendered at the same size : 1000*600 pixels. The benchmarks were made on three different computers :

A quad core desktop that was tested with and without overclocking

A dual core Athlon desktop

A dual core Centrino laptop

Bryce benchmark

The Bryce scene had an IBL lighting and was rendered with superfine antialiasing.

Computer

CPU

Clock speed

Render time

Gain on the laptop

Desktop 1 (oc)

Core 2 Quad Q9450

4 x 3.2 GHz

17'15"

66%

Desktop 1

Core 2 Quad Q9450

4 x 2.66 GHz

20'12"

60%

Desktop 2

Athlon 64X2 4600+

2 x 2.4 GHz

34'42"

31%

Toshiba laptop

Centrino Duo T2300

2 x 1.66 GHz

50'01"

Bryce does not seem to use all the cores in any configuration. With Dual cores, both are used unequally, but not fully. With the Quad core only two cores are used. In both cases, Bryce uses only 50% of the available computing power. However, the Quad core renders the scene in less than half the time of the Centrino based laptop.

Vue benchmark

The Vue scene uses a spectral atmosphere with Global illumination.

Computer

CPU

Clock speed

Render time

Gain on the Laptop

Desktop 1 (oc)

Core 2 Quad Q9450

4 x 3.2 GHz

32'03"

76%

Desktop 1

Core 2 Quad Q9450

4 x 2.66 GHz

36'22"

73%

Desktop 2

Athlon 64X2 4600+

2 x 2.4 GHz

1h 42' 49"

24%

Toshiba laptop

Centrino Duo T2300

2 x 1.66 GHz

2h 15' 25"

Vue uses all the cores when rendering a scene, thus the gain with the Quad Core is far more impressive. But surprisingly, the gain with the Athlon is inferior to what was observed with Bryce.

After making this benchmark scene, I made the VueMark benchmark. Here are the results.

Computer

CPU

Clock speed

VueMark score

Desktop 1 (oc)

Core 2 Quad Q9450

4 x 3.2 GHz

688

Desktop 1

Core 2 Quad Q9450

4 x 2.66 GHz

578

Desktop 2

Athlon 64X2 4600+

2 x 2.4 GHz

216

Toshiba laptop

Centrino Duo T2300

2 x 1.66 GHz

156

The gain is almost the same as with my benchmark scene except that the Athlon gains 27% on the laptop instead of 24%.

Conclusions

The gain for the Quad core is far more than I expected. This machine has a tremendous computing power. But it is nothing compared to machines based on dual Core 2 Extreme that had VueMark scores of above 1000!